Contact centers staffed by agents generally serve as an interface between an organization such as a company and outside entities such as customers. For example, human sales agents at contact centers may assist customers in making purchasing decisions and may receive purchase orders from those customers. Similarly, human support agents at contact centers may assist customers in solving problems with products or services provided by the organization. Interactions between contact center agents and outside entities (customers) may be conducted by speech voice (e.g., telephone calls), video (e.g., video conferencing), text (e.g., emails and text chat), or through other media.
At some contact centers, self-help systems may be configured to handle requests and questions from outside entities, without the involvement of a human agent at the contact center, thereby potentially reducing costs for the contact center. For example, self-help systems may suggest solutions to commonly experienced problems. Examples of self-help systems include the Nuance® Nina® and Genesys® Voice Platform (GVP) systems. Self-help systems may be implemented as interactive voice response (IVR) or interactive media response (IMR) systems having speech input capabilities (e.g., in addition to or instead of responding to dual-tone multi-frequency signals from keypresses).
Generally, self-help systems are customized on a per-organization basis in order to provide information and services that are relevant to the organization and the outside entities that the organization interacts with. For example, a wireless telephone carrier may configure a self-help system to automatically provide instructions for solving problems with cellular connectivity or email access, provide information regarding the customer's current bill, or accept payment information.